Decidim : Open-Source participatory democracy for cities and organizations

nebulon

Decidim is more than a digital platform: it’s a common's free and open project and infrastructure involving code, documentation, design, training courses, a legal framework, collaborative interfaces, user and facilitation communities, and a common vision.

Co-produce strategic planning
Run participatory budgeting
Construct multitudinous deliberation processes
Enact distributed decision-making

Decidim makes possible for thousands of people to organize democratically by making proposal, joining public meetings, creating delibarative discussion, deciding through different forms of voting, and monitoring the implementation of the decisions.

The code is available on GitHub and the app has been dockerized : https://github.com/decidim/decidim

jeau

did anyone work on the integration of a decidim app within Cloudron?

jimcavoli

Strongly prefer Decidim over DemocracyOS for maintenance and security posture (echos my thoughts on that thread: https://forum.cloudron.io/post/3286)

jdaviescoates

Decidim seems to be beginning to get some serious traction, e.g.

Spanish Co-ops are using it for virtual AGMs and assemblies:
https://community.coops.tech/t/online-assembly/2144/3?u=jdaviescoates

The town authority of Bühl, Germany, is using it internally (and has plans to get the citizens involved too), see:
https://fsfe.org/news/2020/news-20200630-01.html

(the latter article is primary about how Bühl used Jitsi Meet to offer a free video meeting to their citizens, but also touches on their use of Decidim, and is also where I found out about the awesome 4Minitz app)

Would love to see Decidim on Cloudron!

jeau

I installed decidim for a collective of citizens for the local elections of my city in France (Poitiers).

It's a really powerfull software that can be used by small and big entities.
In France, there are also more and more installations.
https://club.decidim.opensourcepolitics.eu/assemblies/Decidim/f/202/

jdaviescoates

@jeau that's great!

jimcavoli

Okay, so this is back in my crosshairs to one extent or another, and that's good since I don't know of anyone else packaging on a regular basis who spends all day in Ruby like I tend to

The main thing to point out here is that while I definitely can package this, Decidim itself is not an app, but a constellation of Rails engines (it's a Ruby on Rails framework thing - https://guides.rubyonrails.org/engines.html if you want to read), so it has to be packaged up inside of a host Rails app to actually be of any use. I think such a thing could be written and done to a fairly positive result, with reasonably easy maintenance, but that would be my main concern.

I expect this will likely not be something I'm ready to pick up for a while, so curious to gauge interest in this app specifically, as well as any other feedback about dealbreakers and/or maintenance concerns.

jdaviescoates

@jimcavoli I'm certainly very interested in this. Would be great to be able to offer it to local authorities large and small to improve their democratic decision making systems.

jdaviescoates

Some good news about Decidim

"The agreement establishes a financial contribution framework that serves as a scale for other national or international public bodies that wish to join in the future."

Should hopefully mean the software is well funded going forward.

See:

https://meta.decidim.org/assemblies/general-assembly-association/f/1204/posts/166